February 3, 2010 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) –
Memset, one of the UK’s leading IT hosting companies has revealed that they expect to save their customers over 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions during 2010 through the use of cloud computing.
The company has deployed several thousand of their Miniserver Virtual Machines, and expects to add another 2,000 during 2010. From those servers alone, this will save an additional estimated 750 metric tonnes of CO2 through the use of virtualisation, made more generally accessible thanks to Memset’s investment in systems automation.
Each virtual machine (VM) would otherwise have been a physical server. A normal server or PC uses around 90-120 Watts continuously, whereas one of Memset's Xen-based Miniserver VMs uses 5-10Watts, but does the same work. Taking into account cooling and other data centre inefficiencies one can assume a 100Watt/VM saving in round numbers:
2,000 VMs x 100 Watts = 200,000 Watts
x 30.4 days x 24 hours = 146,000 kWh / month
x 430g / kWh = 62,800 kg CO2 / month
= 750 tonnes CO2 / year
Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset said: “I was really quite surprised when I crunched the numbers and found that we are helping save over 1,000 tonnes of CO2 every year, with that amount set to rise by another 700 tonnes/year in 2010 alone. 700 tonnes is equivalent to taking 200 cars off the road every year.”
The IT host openly shares its hard-learnt virtualisation strategies and is hoping that others will be encouraged to follow suit by utilising virtualisation, and in areas like joining the European Code of Conduct on Data Centre Efficiency, to which Memset was the first British Web host to sign up.
The cost savings that Memset can deliver are also very compelling and demonstrate that Cloud really is a very viable option for business users. For example; take a typical medium-sized non-IT business which has a small data centre room with 10 racks and 100 servers, aged between 0 and 4 years old. Assuming that:
- 3 year hardware refresh cycle
- No virtualisation
- 70 servers running single apps
- 20 servers in clusters running high-capacity tasks
- 10 storage servers
- Team of 3 systems administrators
This business is looking at costs of around £223,000 per year including staffing, server capital, power, cooling and space.
By migrating to the Cloud with a managed service provider such as Memset hardware can be consolidated onto a smaller number of higher-performance servers and storage solutions, and wastage will be eliminated by sizing resources suitable for hosting the application and no more. In this example customer would save a massive 57% (£127,000 per year - memset.com/it-hosting for a breakdown) on their IT costs by migrating to Memset's virtualised environment, while at the same time benefiting from their tight ISO27001 security and nationally-leading customer support.
About Memset
Memset is an award-winning dedicated web hosting company. Established in November 2002, the company was the first to offer high quality, flexible dedicated server packages on a fair and scalable pricing model. The development of their Miniserver™ technology has enabled Memset to be recognised as the leading developer and supplier of virtual dedicated server systems in the UK.
Memset is Britain's first Carbon Neutral ISP, has been voted best UK Web Host for four consecutive years by PC Pro readers and was the UK's first web host to sign up to the EU Data Centre Code of Conduct.
